It’s a Lie That Working Poor Don’t Pay Taxes

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/28-10

In this age of afflicting the poor and comforting the rich — a favorite pastime of the tea partiers and the new Republican Party they’ve helped shape — there’s a popular myth making the rounds on the Internet that nearly half of working Americans don’t pay taxes, and isn’t that an outrage?



Candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, the Texas motor mouth who believes Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, help build this perception, insisting that before restoring the pre-George W. Bush taxes on the rich we need to make everyone pay some federal income tax.

Bachmann says the lower-income workers, after all, use the parks and roads and benefit from defense measures the government provides to keep us all safe. Perry claims that it’s an “injustice” that so few American citizens pay income taxes. Of course, in Texas they don’t have any personal state income tax at all, just the highest percentage of uninsured and a growing unemployment rate. Perhaps that explains a lot.

But the truth is that every working American pays taxes. Before they even get a chance to cash their paychecks, 6.2 percent has been deducted for Social Security and another 1.45 percent for Medicare. (This year the Social Security payroll tax for everyone has been temporarily lowered to 4.2 percent as part of President Obama’s stimulus program.)

More at the link --

[LiberalFighter]

1. If they want all of their income taxed THEN it should mean that

those that have some of their income taxed will have all of their income taxed.

Everyone that itemizes their deductions when filing their federal tax returns has more of their income exempt from taxes than the ones that these jackasses complain about.

[quaker bill]

2. It is stupid.

We subsidize food and shelter for the working poor as it is. Now, we could tax them and increase the benefits they will need to eat and have housing, or alternately leave things alone. If you want bigger government programs, one way to get there is to tax the poor.

It would make more sense to raise the minimum wage to a figure large enough so that people could live without subsidies for food and shelter, then just let them keep the money. This is the way to get to smaller government programs. But "we can't afford" that. What we can afford is "block grants" to developers to construct subsidized "affordable" housing.

[Kalidurga]

3. I tried to explain this to a teatard,

that if money comes out of your check it is an income tax. Just because you aren't filing the taxes doesn't mean your income isn't taxed and that says nothing about sales tax which is another form of income tax. Then there is property taxes and other assorted "fees" that even poor people have to pay if they want government "services" such as a marriage license.

[hifiguy]

4. Sales tax, gas tax, even if you're a renter

some of that rent goes to property tax, "sin" taxes. Everybody pays taxes. The teahadis are just too damned dumb for this to get through their incredibly dense, thick skulls.

[gratuitous]

5. There's also the little-noticed "wealthy" tax

Working poor people, by having to accept low wages, are directly subsidizing corporations and the wealthy. For every dime of Wealth created by Labor that doesn't make it into the worker's pocket, it's going somewhere else. And considering the nearly exponential increase in the amount of Wealth controlled by fewer and fewer persons in this country, the answer more often than not is into the pockets of already rich.

How much more do the wealthy need when they've plundered so much already?